Founder of Cairolive
Tarek Atia
Journalist, media entrepreneur, and the founder of Cairolive, a site the Internet Archive shows online since at least January 1999.
The beat
A journalist working the hyperlocal beat
Tarek Atia is a journalist and media entrepreneur who founded Cairolive in the early days of the Egyptian web, and has spent his career since arguing for hyperlocal journalism: coverage built around a neighborhood, not only a nation.
Source
Cairolive
The site he started, and still directs
Cairolive.com was his project first. It is archived live on 16 January 1999, and he remains its founder and editorial director today, setting the editorial vision and voice while The Mok Company builds and runs the platform.
Source
Online since at least January 1999, and still reporting the same city.
From the street to the boardroom
Cultural leadership, built on street-level reporting
Atia cut his teeth as a beat reporter, largely for Al-Ahram Weekly, chronicling street-level stories while tracking the corridors of power around them. That same instinct carried into his institutional roles: as Managing Director of the Tahrir Cultural Center and Campus, the American University in Cairo’s downtown hub, he favored inclusive public engagement and heritage preservation over top-down programming. He also founded and served as editorial director of Jacaranda, a multi-platform publication under the Center’s umbrella that maps and debates the arts and creative sectors across Egypt and the region.
SourceEditorial career
Editorial roles and media development consulting
He was assistant editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Weekly, and his writing has appeared in The Washington Post and Neue Zürcher Zeitung. From 2006 he worked in media development, designing capacity-building programs, including projects backed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, for more than 5,000 journalists, editors and managers across print, broadcast and online media by 2015. He has also served as an adjunct lecturer at Cairo University’s Faculty of Mass Communication, at the American University in Cairo, and at the Intajour International Media Academy in Hamburg, and has mentored generations of young journalists on editorial independence and digital storytelling ethics.
SourceEMDP and Mantiqti
Founding a hyperlocal newsroom
In 2011 he founded the Egypt Media Development Program (EMDP), a media training and consulting company for the Egyptian and regional media sector, and served as its CEO. EMDP publishes Mantiqti ("My Neighborhood"), which he conceived and launched as a hyperlocal media platform giving voice to overlooked Downtown Cairo neighborhoods, described as Egypt’s first hyperlocal print newspaper. He grew up in the United States, where he saw a strong local media culture, an experience he cites in arguing for hyperlocal journalism in Egypt.
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Coming soon
A continuing series into the archive
A continuing series revisiting the Cairolive archive, written by a journalist to be announced.
Follow the seriesRead more about Cairolive.
About Cairolive